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Cisco ACI makes automating networks easy
Updated February 13, 2023

Cisco ACI makes automating networks easy

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

I implement Cisco ACI at different customers with different sets of requirements. From a simple L2 fabric to complex fabrics with service graphs, transit routing, multi-site multi-pod and automation.
The business problems often solved in deployments are datacenter interconnect, ease of management and security concerns. Solved by multi-pod/multi-site. APIC / Automation and Service integration with firewalls.
  • Underlay deployment
  • Datacenter interconnectivity
  • Automation possibilities
  • Security from default deny to service integration
  • Contract management at scale could be better
  • Options to provide insight in application communication would be very nice
  • AI assisted troubleshooting would be a welcome addition
  • Horizontal scale out provides the ability to add ports with almost no work
  • Automation makes deploying new networks or applications possible in minutes instead of days
NSX-T and ACI both are definitely awesome products. I tend to use ACI in networks that have more barebone and/or alternative hypervisors. NSX still works best in VMware heavy networks. Another consideration is where the network is managed, by which team. If the network is solely managed by the network team ACI tends to be a better fitting solution.

Also since ACI is a complete solution you don't need any other products. If you implement NSX you will still need a physical network.
The best scale benefit of ACI is the fact that it scales horizontally very well. Both in number of switches and the ease of adding switches to the network as adding services to the network. So for example it is very easy to add multiple firewalls in a cluster using anycast services. This makes it easy to horizontally scale firewalls as well on the ACI network.
ACI automation makes deploying networks and application a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. The readily available modules for Ansible, Terraform and python make automation really easy.

Do you think Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) again?

Yes

Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD-Access), Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches, Cisco Nexus Dashboard
I tend to deploy ACI in datacenter environments with a lot of different connecting workloads. It performs better than NSX-T when you have lot's of bare metal servers or other hypervisors than ESX, for example Hyper-V or Nutanix. It's also a very nice solution when you need an easy way to deploy datacenter interconnect with or without L2 flooding.

The greatest difficulty I encounter when implementing ACI is that it takes time to learn as the constructs are different from regular networking solutions.